Web feeds, in particular of the syndication type, are widely used on the internet in particular in order to inform users on contents available (summary of articles published on the website), to advise them of the updating of content (photographs, software upgrades, etc) on a website or to deliver structured information such as weather forecasts. These feeds are generally published by the website in question and accessible to users who have subscribed to these feeds, through in particular a web feed aggregator or a web feed reader.
Web feeds take the form of a document, generally based on the XML (“eXtensible Markup Language”) format, defining, in a first part, a set of properties relating to this feed (for example its name, the address at which it can be found, or the date of last update) and then, in a second part, a set of entries associated with the contents.
Each web feed entry describes content elements (or “items”) by means of unique identifier within the web feed and information relating to the content: for example, a publication date, a title, possibly a summary and other details. Thus each entry represents one or more content elements (article, photograph, etc) published on one or more web feeds.
Because these web feeds are written in a standard XML format intended to describe the publication of a content, web feeds can easily be processed by applications, unlike HTML (“HyperText Markup Language”) files, which are viewed in a web browser when an internet site is consulted.
Applications have thus been able to come into being, for example the one by means of which an internet site automatically displays, on its own pages, a summary of the contents published on another website. By virtue of the web feed, this application has become easy to set up since it consists, for the first internet site, of simply recovering the web feed from the other site by a conventional subscription and thus obtaining a summary of the contents of the other site.
In addition, the establishment of feed readers offers many possibilities for the user. A feed reader is a program to which the user will indicate certain web feeds to be monitored. This is what is called subscribing to a web feed.
The reader is then responsible for periodically recovering the web feed for the purpose of determining whether updates have been made. Where applicable, the web feed can indicate to the user, for example by means of a specific display, that new data are available.
The reader can also directly display the web feed as periodically recovered, thus offering applications of the weather, stock exchange, latest news etc type).
An appreciable advantage of the web feed is that, by subscribing, the user no longer needs to go to each site in order to check where the updates have been made. This is because it suffices for him to consult his web feed and, if some updates interest him, he can then go to the site concerned in order to obtain more details, possibly via a link directly integrated in the entries of the web feed.
The main web feed standards are known by the terminology RSS, standing for “Really Simply Syndication” in the RSS 2.0 version, and Atom (RFC 4287 of the IETF).
FIG. 1a shows an example of an RSS feed in which an entry <item> (corresponding to a content element) comprises a title <title>, a link <link> (the address at which the resource can be consulted), a description <description>, a publication date <pubDate> and an identifier <guid>.
FIG. 1b shows an example of a web feed according to the competing format Atom, in which the presence is observed, within an entry <entry>, of a title <title>, a link <link>, an identifier <id>, a date of updating <updated> and a summary <summary>. The Atom format was developed to solve certain problems inherent in the RSS format, in particular concerning the data contained, the type of which can be indicated with Atom, or vis-á-vis content management in several languages.
In order to guarantee an effective consultation of the entries of the feeds and not to overload the users with an excessive amount of information, these web feeds generally contain a limited number of entries. For example, with a limit of 20 entries, the web feed in question contains the last 20 elements of published contents.
In the mechanisms currently used, the updating of the web feed consists of adding new entries corresponding to the content elements to be published (those that have never been inserted in the web feed) as soon as these are available.
This is particularly the case with blog platforms. Some options do however make it possible to define a date or a frequency at which the new blog articles must be published in the RSS feed.
However, it is usual, in some cases, for the content elements to be published to become available at an irregular rate, in which case it may happen that the number of content elements to be published in the web feed exceeds the number of entries forming this feed.
In our example, even if there are 100 new content elements to be published, only 20 can be described in the web feed. With the conventional mechanisms, the feed will therefore describe only the last 20 content elements, the first 80 elements for their part not appearing in the web feed.
Likewise, in the case where these 100 content elements to be published are obtained in a short interval of time (for example one new element each minute), even if all the elements are at one moment described in the feed, the period during which they will be visible in the feed will be short (here 20 minutes). This visibility period may be deemed insufficient: this is because, in many cases, the frequency of consultation of a web feed by a user is generally substantially less (for example once or twice per day) than this visibility frequency.
In both cases, the result is therefore that the first 80 content elements do not have good visibility.
There therefore exists a need to improve, through the web feeds, the visibility of new content elements to be published that are created at an irregular rate.
The present invention addresses the drawbacks of the prior art and in particular responds to this requirement.